


The Lives We've Shared

by SeaWitchDreams



Category: The Bifrost Incident - The Mechanisms (Album), The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: F/F, Non-Linear Narrative, The mechs do not observe linear time and neither do I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-14
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-22 06:14:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30034302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SeaWitchDreams/pseuds/SeaWitchDreams
Summary: Right around the corner, a new world's being born.Or: Sigyn and Loki, before.
Relationships: Loki/Sigyn (The Bifrost Incident)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6
Collections: Mechs Album Week





	The Lives We've Shared

At night, beneath the covers, Loki whispers to Sigyn of the new world they will make. 

In the still darkness of their bedroom, she paints a picture of the Midgard that could be. The freedom of it. All the things they will build, all the things they will fix. The government they will make to fill the void Asgard will leave behind – one that will be just and wise and kind. 

“You could be our new ruler.” She smiles one night. “The first elected Queen of free Midgard. Or would you be a president?” 

Sigyn laugh, a little incredulously. “Me, really? Why me?” 

“Who else?” Loki presses their shoulders together, her long hair tickling Sigyn lightly. “Fenrir is a great military leader, but we both know he would be terrible at running a planet, and I think he knows it too.” 

“There are other people. Ones with more experience.” 

“Old and tired and set in their ways.” says Loki dismissively. “And none of them half as clever as you.” 

Sigyn doesn’t answer. For a while she lies in the darkness, Loki warm at her side, and tries to imagine what could be. 

“And anyway,” Loki says, a while later. “Would you really trust anyone else to do it right?” 

Sigyn smiles. No one knows her better than Loki. “I guess Queen Sigyn the First it is.” 

“what will you do in this new world of ours?” Sigyn asks another night. It’s been a bad day, at the end of a bad week in a bad month, and Sigyn is so, so tired. She is covered in bruises and she feels like she can still sense the blood on her skin, smell the gunpowder on Loki’s fingers. She wants to think of a world where their lives are different – wants to imagine Loki in that better, Brighter world when she can be anything (she needs to remember what she is fighting for). 

“I would like to build tracks again.” Her lover says softly. “good tracks. Tracks that will help this planet flourish. Connect us to the rest of the world on our own term, help with the trade and let people travel and see the galaxy.” 

Sigyn twines their fingers. “Do you miss it?” 

“Sometimes.” Loki says. “I believe in what I do now, in a way I never _believed_ in the work I was doing with Odin, but… I loved it, and I am tired of fire and blood. I build bombs and hope that one day I could build bridges again.” 

Sometimes they imagine the people they could have been, had that world existed. 

"Would we have even met in that world?" Loki wonders. “Born on the opposite sides of the system? If I’d never became Odin’s protégé, If you didn’t have to come to Asgard in order to have influence?” 

"Of course we would've." Sigyn says. She cannot imagine a world in which she and Loki don’t love each other . "I would've crossed the stars for you. I would’ve seen you crossing the street in a sunny afternoon and immediately _known_.” 

She can imagine it so clearly, those different Loki and Sigyn, born to a world a bit less cruel. They would have met by chance and flirted on the sidewalk, would have called each other in the middle of the night to talk about mundane things. They would’ve lived together, in a pretty house in the capitol. Sigyn would’ve dragged Loki with her to balls, to dance until the suns rose again. They would have gotten married in a beautiful ceremony, with all of their friends around them, alive and happy and free. 

That is a different world, and the Sigyn and Loki who are here will never meet for the first time without shackles around their wrists, will never fall in love without weapons in their hands. But there are parts of that dream-world, that dream-life, that one day could still be theirs. 

“When our world is born,” Sigyn asks, "will you marry me there?" 

"I'll marry you here." Loki answers. 

* 

Loki disappears from Asgard three days after the Bifrost’s first test run. Odin tries to keep it quiet – her new project’s leading engineer going missing is not something she needs getting out. Sigyn find out anyway, because Baldur tells her when he calls. 

“I’m contacting anyone who might know where she could’ve gone.” He explains. “You two were friends, weren’t you? She spoke of you.” 

_We were? She did?_ Sigyn has never been sure. She has never been sure of anything, when it came to Loki. 

“I don’t know where she is.” She says instead. “We haven’t spoken in… a while.” 

(Not ever since that night when Sigyn spoke too strongly and saw the wariness rising in the other woman’s eyes. Some things were too delicate, to important, to be risked for the company of one of Odin’s own.) 

“Do you think something happened to her?” She asks worriedly. 

“no.” Baldur’s tone is uncharacteristically grim. “She left behind a resignation letter.” 

Four months later, she shows up at Sigyn’s doorstep. 

For a moment, Sigyn doesn’t recognize her. It is the out-of place feeling of it, most of all – Loki is a person Sigyn meets when she goes to Asgard, someone she sees at high society events. she doesn’t belong on Midgard, showing up on Sigyn’s doorstep in the middle of the night with her hair dirty and her clothes unkempt, looking like a woman on the run. 

“You were right.” She says, as soon as the door opens. “I was wrong.” 

Sigyn stares. The moment stretches. 

Loki shifts awkwardly. “Can I come in?” 

Sigyn moves aside and lets her, watching as she struggles to drag her suitcase through the door. It’s small and beat up and probably contains all of her possessions, and that fact is so jarring, the entire scene so wrong, that Sigyn finally finds her words. 

“What are you doing here?” She asks. “Baldur called _months_ ago and said you were _missing_.” 

“Please don’t tell him I’m here. Odin wouldn’t just let me go if she knew where to find me.” 

“Just let you go.” Sigyn repeats. “Because you resigned from your job. Your dream job you’ve been preparing for since you were a child. _Why?_ ” 

Loki collapses on one of the couches in the small living room. She seems exhausted - tired to the bone. Sigyn could almost believe she hasn’t really slept since leaving Asgard. 

“Because you were right.” She says again. “Because what I was doing wrong, and I couldn’t do that anymore.” 

At those words, Sigyn stops. She gives Loki a piercing glance. 

“I thought you ‘don’t care about politics’.” She says, not quite managing to keep the bite out of her voice. “That you just want to make science and progress, and trust Odin to decide about their use.” 

Loki flinches, and looks down at her hands. She is digging her fingernails into her palms, so much that she is nearly bleeding, and Sigyn fights down the urge to reach out and pull her hands apart. She needs an answer to this. 

“I did.” She says, eventually, and her voice shakes. “But then we tested the track and I saw it in reality and I just… It’s not…” She closes her eyes. “There will be consequences for this. There will be consequences and they might be terrible and I don’t think Odin cares. And I don’t want any part in it, I want – “ 

Her voice breaks. Then she raises her head and meets Sigyn’s eyes. 

There is something strangely haunted in her eyes, something that makes a chill run up Sigyn’s spine. “That train has to be stopped.” 

Sigyn moves forward, then. Kneels in front of Loki and takes the Asgardian’s hands in hers. She realizes they are shaking. 

“I’m sorry.” Loki whispers. “I – you are the only one I know who – I didn’t have anywhere else to go.” 

Sigyn looks at her then, for a very long time. She should suspect this is a trap, maybe – should at least take the option into consideration. But she can’t, not really. Loki is honest, always been – a rare trait in the Asgardian high society. Sigyn would suspect deceit from almost anyone she had met there, but not from her. And the look on her face is so shaken, so desperate – she is not faking it. Sigyn knows she is not. 

Loki is honest, and she is shaken, and behind the fear in her eyes, there is determination. 

Sigyn makes a choice. 

“There are some people.” She says slowly. “That I think you should meet.” 

* 

The police keep asking her the same questions. 

_Where is your wife?_

I don’t know. 

_When did you last hear from her?_

Three weeks ago. 

_Why did she leave?_ _W_ _as she acting strange?_

She said she had something important to do. She was… the second most upset I have ever seen her. 

She was so determined, too. 

_Did you know she was planning to attack the Ratatosk? Did you know she was planning to kill Baldur?_

No. 

They don’t believe her. They can’t prove anything. In the end, the have to let her go. 

Sigyn is a good, law abiding Midgardian, after all. The kind of woman who is invited to Asgardian events and makes polite conversation of the latest scandals. Not the kind of woman who has laser guns in her basement and criminals in her spare room. She speaks pleasantly to the officers interrogating her. She speaks calmly and reasonably as she calls for more rights for her people. she would not spend her nights sitting at the resistance headquarters, coordinating attacks on transport lines, would not lead an armed force against an Asgardian police station, her face covered and an axe in her hand. 

She would not kiss her wife goodbye, wishing her success and luck and bravery, as she left to prepare the missiles. 

They can believe that or not, as they will. It does not matter. And anyway, it is only the last answer that she lies about. 

For the next month, they hunt Loki through Midgard. They search the cities, break into old safehouses and arrests dozens of suspected collaborators, both members of the resistance and innocent, unlucky bystanders. One time, a force of soldiers led by Tyr himself even manages to find and attack one of the resistance’s main bases. Loki isn’t there, but Fenrir is, and resistance will tell stories of the battle that follows for years to come (They say Fenrir cut Tyr’s hand off in one strike. When the furious commander comes to question her once more, Sigyn glances at the stump and observes that reality, as ever, is much less clean than the story.) 

It is one of the worst periods to have come to the Midgardian people and to the resistance in particular in a long, long time. But it eventually it ends, and when the dust settles the train is destroyed, maybe forever, and Loki is still free. 

The following months, they are careful. There are more soldiers in the streets, more not-soldiers watching Sigyn wherever she goes for signs of treason. But those, too, grow fewer, and Sigyn was never an easy woman to keep track of. 

Four months after Baldur dies in flames, Sigyn is sitting at the kitchen table in a small safehouse in the eastern region, going over reports with a pair of tired spies, when the door opens and Loki comes in. 

The reports fall to the floor, the spies scramble out of the room as Sigyn stumbles out of her chair and toward the door. Loki falls into her arms like a breaking tree, and for the first time in four months, Sigyn breaths. 

For a long, long time, they just hold each other on the kitchen’s stained floor. Sigyn doesn’t let go as Loki begins to shake, as she feels the tears soaking her shoulders. 

“I killed him.” She whispers. “Sigyn, I killed him.” 

Sigyn thinks of the stories Loki told her, of three young prodigies taken in by Odin, who believed that the world would be theirs and swore to always stand together. 

Sigyn thinks of the nights when Loki would wake up screaming from nightmares she couldn’t quite explain. 

“The train.” She would always say. “She cannot launch that train.” 

Sigyn tightens her holds around her love. “You did what you had to do. You put an end to it.” 

Loki shakes her head. “She got away. This isn’t over. She would not stop.” 

“You took out her best engineer and all they had built.” 

“All I did was buy us some time.” 

“Time matters. A lot can be done in some bitterly earned time.” 

* 

They have two ceremonies. 

It is a matter of practicality, mostly. Sigyn is a public figure, a socialite. Midgardian or not, her wedding is an event. By necessity, it will be grand, it will be expansive, it will be full of high up Asgardians and the few people of lesser planets who are successful enough to move in those circles. It will be entirely done by Asgardian tradition and fashion – anything else will endanger Sigyn’s position in ways she can’t afford. 

And so Sigyn of Midgard will marry twice. Once in front of the people who bound and oppressed and exploited her planet, who she have spent her whole life dancing among and plotting against, and once in front of her friends and comrades, in the ceremonies of her people. 

And so Loki of Asgard will marry twice. Once in front of the people who made her, who were once her own, who she had abandoned – and once with the people she chose and fought for, who took her in and made her one of their own. 

It feels right, in a way. True to the lives they had lived, even more that those they haven’t. they had always been made in halves, created by two worlds. They would marry in both those world, face them all together, and know all their different versions will always love each other. 

The public ceremony happens first. 

By all rights, this should be happening in Asgard. But Loki hadn’t wanted, hadn’t dared to return there so publicly, and Sigyn understands. In truth, she doesn’t want that either – her wedding, both of them, should be preformed on the earth of her home. Asgard does not get to take this. 

At the very least, the location means Odin won’t show up. The All-mother rarely leaves Asgard, these days, and only for the most important of events. She will not do it for Loki, no matter what they had meant to each other, once upon a time. Sigyn feels her almost-wife's relief at that fact, as clear as day (sometimes Sigyn wonders about what happened between Loki and Odin, wonders if there is more to the story than she has been told. She never quite manages to ask, and Loki never really answers). 

Odin doesn’t come. Thor and Baldur do.   
they come in together, halfway through the reception. Sigyn is in the middle of a conversation with Freya, listening to the Asgardian offering he semi-sincere congratulation and avoiding half a dozen invasive questions, when by her side Loki breaths in sharply. Her hand tightens in Sigyn’s hold. Sigyn’s follows her gaze, then quickly makes their excuses and pulls them both away to a quiet corner. 

Loki is pale, suddenly looking more threatenedin the peaceful hall than Sigyn has seen her on battlefields. She wants to talk to her, to ask her what is going through her head, but there is no time. Their new guests approach. 

Loki takes a deep breath and turns to face them. 

“I wasn’t sure you would come.” She says. 

“Of course we would.” Says Baldur. “It’s your _wedding.”_

_“_ Of course we would.” Says Thor, a bit more pointedly. “It’s the first time we knew where to find you in _ten years_.” 

A long silence. then Loki says. “I’m glad you are here.” 

Sigyn believes her. She know that Loki hates the planet that made her. She also knows that even as she rejects everything else, she will always love the two men before them. Sigyn loves her for that, even as it breaks her heart. 

“I don’t understand... anything.” Says Baldur. “And it’s clear that if you were going to explain, you would have done it long ago. So just... you’re happy, right? This is what you want?” 

Loki looks back at Sigyn, and her eyes soften, the anxiousness and misery melting away. she turns back to Baldur. “More than anything.” 

“Okay.” He smiles, just a little. “I guess that’s enough.” 

“What? No, that’s not enough.” Thor cuts in. “After all these years, that’s all? Loki, what the fuck happened?” 

“I can’t... look, can’t you just be happy for me, just today? For old time’s sake?” 

Thor looks at her then, searching for something in her face. “Alright.” He says eventually, then smiles, somewhat ruefully. “Congratulation, Loki. I’m sure you’ll make a terrible wife.” 

Loki laughs. Then, a little tearily, and then leans forward and wraps her arms around him. After a second, he hugs her in return. Baldur grins and moves closer, and they draw him in. for a small moment, the three of them exist alone together, isolated from the harsh world around them. In that moment, Sigyn imagines she can see three young students, full of dreams and innocence and love for each other, before Odin took them under her wing and into her ugly world. 

And Sigyn hates them both, for who they are and all they have done and still doing, but in that moment, she is grateful. 

With Odin absent, Tyr, governor of Midgard, preforms the ceremony. There is a part of Sigyn that rails against that, that cries at the presence the man who personally ordered the execution of her friends, who would kill her right now at the alter if he knew the things she had done. But there is a measure of victory in that, too. Even he is an instrument to their happiness. Tyr declares them married by the law of Asgard and all the nobles cheer, and Sigyn and Loki grin at each other, bright and a little bit too sharp, and Sigyn knows they are both thinking the same thing. 

_Just you wait._

That night, they both sneak out together, holding hands and giggling like teenagers. The driver they stop doesn’t recognize them, but smiles softly, conspiratorially at the sight of the two women in green Midgardian wedding gowns grinning at each other in the back seat as they direct her through a covert path outside the city and get out of the vehicle a walking distance from the farm that the resistance uses as their local base. 

Fenrir preforms the ceremony, their leader’s scarred, serious face lighting with a rare, genuine smile. There are wedding flowers in their hair and the small gathering of warriors raises their hands in respect when Loki and Sigyn swear to stand together until the stars burn out. They cheer when the lean in for the kiss, a sound reminiscent of a battlefield cheer but so much lighter, so full of joy. Hati and Sleipnir pull out their instruments and start playing, an old, jovial tune that fills the field and cool night air. Sigyn pulls her wife to the improvised dance floor, and Loki laughs when she spins her in her arms, and there is nothing in the world but them. 

* 

There is the party: glittering lights floating in the air. beautiful music played by an unseen band. The Asgard elite, fantastic and magnificent in their shimmering gowns. 

(Sigyn will remember that so clearly, even decades later: the party, the voices, the thrum of the music, the flow of the conversation. Light reflecting off a woman’s necklace. The taste of cherry cake.) 

There is a woman, sitting alone in the back, bent over a book, her face hidden by a curtain of red hair. The golden ornamentson her dress glimmer in the lights. She is untouched by the lively happenings surrounding her, her corner a small island of quiet. 

There is Sigyn, in her finest dress, moving through the party with practiced grace. not a rebel yet, but a woman on her way to the top, with head full of dreams and bones full of anger she has not yet understood. She wanders from conversation to conversation, expertly navigating the currents of the party. She spots the stranger from across the ballroom, and curiosity raises its head. 

She makes her way to the small table at taps her finger on the chair nearest to the woman. “Would you mind if I sit?” 

The woman does not raise her head from the book. “Uh, no.” 

Sigyn waits a minute. The woman keeps ignoring her. The rudeness of it is so jarring, so out-of-place here, that Sigyn can’t help but find it intriguing rather that insulting. 

**“** I think,” she eventually declare s , “That you have misunderstood the concept of _party.”_

The woman sighs and finally raises her head to look at her. Sigyn sees her eyes for the first time – pale and alert and beautiful. **“** I understand it perfectly. I just don’t like it.” She seems annoyed, but Sigyn doesn’t feel as if the sentiment is directed at her. “I told Baldur I didn’t want to go, but he insisted it will be ‘good for me’. Thor managed to get out with the excuse of work, that lucky bastard.” 

Sigyn glances to her left, where Baldur is standing at the heart of the party, laughing loudly. She knows him, of course – everyone who is someone knows Odin’s bright protégé. Rumor said there were others, less sociable but just as promising in the Allmother’s eyes – but Sigyn has never met any of them, or heard of someone who did. She turns back to her table companion. 

“Well,” she says. “I do enjoy the concept of parties, but I have grown rather tired. I hope you would not mind keeping me company for a while.” 

The woman seemed to consider it. “Are you going to expect me to dance?” 

“I would like you to.” Sigyn says, finding a surprising measure of honesty in the words. “But I have patience, and we have time.” 

The woman blushes, only slightly. Sigyn smiles and offers her hand. “I’m Lady Sigyn of Midgard.” 

The woman looks at her hand for a moment. Then, with a careful gesture, she closes the book and takes her hand. 

Her grip is gentle but steady, and Sigyn has a good feeling about this. 

“I’m Loki.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on tumblr! I am @annietheseawitch.


End file.
